During the 2008 presidential election, as skeptics of Barack Obama questioned his support for Israel, his campaign, with help from media allies, pursued an aggressive counteroffensive. The strategy was to delegitimize reasonable criticism of Obama’s record by lumping it together with zany conspiracy theories from fringe figures and anonymous Internet commenters.

Weeks before the election, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a post titled, “Dear Jews: Stop the Obama Paranoia.” He urged, “all you rumor-mongering, fever-headed Jewish conspiracists: Support McCain, if you want, and there are credible reasons for doing so, but stop smearing Obama in the face of overwhelming evidence that the man is a great friend of Jews and of Israel. After a point, it becomes obvious that what you fear is not Israel’s destruction, but the presence of an African-American in the White House. And that’s disgusting.”